The Importance of the Teeth for Overall Health

By Jeffrey L. Brown, DDS

Did you know that your teeth are particularly important to your overall health? Not only do your teeth allow you to chew your food in preparation for digestion, but the teeth also support the jaw joints and your airway as well. Most people are well aware that teeth are needed for chewing food- that is obvious. The ability to chew is really important in maintaining digestive health. If you are missing teeth, the food will be broken down less which means your stomach and other digestive organs have to work harder. This can lead to reflux and other health problems.

Another important function of the teeth is to maintain the airway (to a certain degree). This is right, if you pull out teeth, you end up collapsing the airway to some extent. Let’s look at this a bit more. In the past, it was quite common to extract teeth- bicuspids usually – to make orthodontics go easier. It was so much easier to line up the teeth if they were less crowded. Unfortunately, time has shown repeatedly that pulling teeth can cause the upper and lower jaws to drop backward at a supine position. This reaction just closes up the airway and makes breathing more difficult at nighttime. This is where sleep apnea can begin. Too many people have had their bicuspids excised and now pay the price with poor sleep, snoring, constant tiredness, and cognitive difficulties due to lack of good sleep.

An aspect of the teeth that is poorly understood is the connection to the temporomandibular joint or the TMJ. When the teeth are just too short, this means the condyle (top of the jawbone) can go too deeply into the socket and put pressure on the protective disc up in the joint. This can lead to head and neck pain and a host of other health problems. This is where a proper orthodontic analysis needs to be done. An MRI of the TMJs might be appropriate to determine if the vertical height of the teeth is enough to support the TMJs or not. A CBCT x-ray is also important to determine if the condyles are properly situated in the joints. If it is determined that the vertical height of the teeth is insufficient, then it is relatively straightforward to erupt or lift the teeth taller to better support the joints. It’s actually pretty amazing that this kind of analysis is not routine when it comes to doing orthodontics. Proper support for the jaw joints allows the condyle and disc system to operate properly.

As more and more physicians and dentists learn about the importance of teeth for good overall health, awareness will increase, and people will be more attentive to keeping their teeth in good shape for the long term. They will also become more aware of how good dental health means better sleep and better health for the body overall.